Media play devices have enjoyed increasing popularity in recent years. Media play devices may include handheld computers, wireless telephones, portable media players, personal digital assistants (“PDAs”), and the like. Over time, media playback devices have acquired increasing functionality, and many such devices now provide their users with rich experiences not possible just a few years ago.
The advent of digital media and analog/digital conversion technologies, especially those that are usable on mass-market general-purpose personal computers, has vastly increased the concerns of copyright-dependent organizations, especially within the music and movie industries. While analog media inevitably loses quality with each copy generation, and in some cases even during normal use, digital media files may often be duplicated with no degradation in the quality of subsequent copies. The advent of personal computers as household appliances has made it convenient for consumers to convert media (which may or may not be copyrighted) originally in a physical/analog form or a broadcast form into a universal, digital form for location-shifting and/or time-shifting. The ease with which digital media may be obtained and copied, combined with increased use of the Internet and popular file sharing tools, has made unauthorized distribution of copies of copyrighted digital media (so-called digital piracy) increasingly common.